How Cynical Can One Be?

 Since high school, friends have called me cynical. One thing learned in prison is I have long-standing trust issues; I attribute my default state of paranoia to those issues. Paranoia and lack of trust seem to me to be the root of cynicism.

Today, I want to point you to Julia Conrad's Maria Messina’s Feminine Flaw. 

I currently live in Palermo on a Fulbright grant meant to foster cultural exchange, but my outlook is still pathologically optimistic: I remain hopeful in an uncool way about the future of institutions and the improvement of people’s terrible boyfriends. Cynicism seems fruitlessly paralyzing to me, if not a cliché macho posture. That said, during periods when political news seems to reach depressing new lows every day, the writer I have been turning to for comfort is Maria Messina, the Negative Nancy of Italian letters. There is no masculine equivalent to the term Negative Nancy, and so it seems all the more inspiring that in 1909 a twenty-two-year-old girl in Sicily published her first collection of short stories, frankly describing the world as a shithole.

Well, yeah, I know that feeling.

Willpower is everywhere in Messina’s life and work: In 1909, in immaculate and pretty handwriting, she had the nerve to introduce herself to Verga, one of the most celebrated authors in Italian literature and a pioneer of Verismo, asking him to support her debut book. “My faith in myself is my guiding light,” she explained in a later letter. But, and this is key to her ethos, willpower or faith should not be confused with any sort of optimism. Hers are not stories of hope, redemption, moralizing, epiphanies, or triumphing through struggle. There is no tragic catharsis that leaves you feeling virtuous just for reading. There is no curated Instagram sheen to either aestheticize or ignore suffering. Instead, each story essentially follows the same narrative arc: Protagonists are introduced in quiet misery, desire some sort of change, then see their desires betrayed, often by those closest to them. Cynicism is taught through repetition: When people and institutions and traditions prove undependable, how could you expect anything else?

Other than unreason, I cannot think what else has dominated this country since 2008 (at least) other than the undependability of people and institutions and traditions. As for Indiana, I would put the start of this with the crash of General Motors and Chrysler back in 1979. What has kept us going is the American ideal of optimism. Even a pessimist like me does not lack some optimism - I still get out of the morning hoping to accomplish something, anything.

Why would I, a pathological optimist, turn to this writer for comfort? Messina is reliably frank to the point of being ugly or inconvenient. I never feel like she’s imposing a worldview on her characters from on high, but simply exploring their minds and experience. The fact that nothing ends well in her work doesn’t feel defeatist, but sympathetic. Messina does not make empty promises, nor does she fault her characters. Brutal honesty and skepticism seems to me a refreshing starting point to think about what could be fundamentally different. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” the political philosopher Antonio Gramsci was famous for saying, decades after Messina embodied that idea through characters who face inescapable hardship yet continue trying to change their circumstances.

I understand the Gramsci quote, probably better at 62 than I have ever during my life. And from this essay, I have another example to follow. Think about, any of you who think there is nothing better than to wallow in fatalism.

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